Which social network to quickly increase my brand awareness?

For a brand, awareness is defined as being known by consumers and perceived by them positively. Increasing brand awareness is essential to generate leads and convert them into customers. It is therefore a crucial issue for any business. Interested in this topic? Hivency, an influencer marketing platform, gives you some tips to increase your company’s brand awareness on social media.

Social media as a vehicle for brand awareness

With4.2 billion active users in 2021, social networks are an incredible tool for companies looking for awareness (source: We are Social). In fact, in 2021, 46% of French marketers indicate that awareness is one of the top three goals their company wants to achieve through social media (source: Hootsuite).

Actually, all platforms can be considered as a vehicle for brand awareness. The only requirement is that you position yourself on the social networks that your potential customers frequent. Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest are ideal for reaching a female audience, aged 18 to 24. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are perfectly suited to reach male consumers aged 25 to 34. Finally, LinkedIn is unmatched for targeting a professional audience (source: Statista via Hivency).

But which of these platforms can improve a brand’s reputation the fastest? When it comes to speed, some social networks stand out from others, especially because they allow you to use a particularly powerful lever: influence marketing.

Influencer marketing to improve brand awareness

Out of 90% of marketers surveyed, influencer marketing is considered as an effective market lever to increase brand awareness (source: Influencer Marketing Hub). Indeed, influencers are important allies when it comes to quickly developing a brand’s reputation. Here are the two main reasons why :

• Content creators are followed daily by a large and loyal audience. They can therefore make a brand, a product or a service known to numerous people in just a few publications.
• Influencers maintain a close relationship with their followers and are often perceived as experts in their preferred field. Their followers trust them and believe that they give reliable recommendations about a brand, product or service.

Marketers that want to make their company known as their offer in a favorable way should create partnerships with influencers. The key to success is to collaborate with opinion leaders who share your values and whose community matches your target. But where to find such influencers?

Using Instagram to increase brand awareness

Instagram is considered by far the most popular social network on which 86% of marketers prefer to run their influencer marketing campaigns (source: Hivency). It is not surprising that in 2021, 67% of French companies consider Instagram to be the most effective social media “to achieve their marketing objectives” (source: Hootsuite).

Several tips allow advertisers to optimize their awareness campaigns to increase their reputation faster:

• Combine macro-influence, for reach, and micro-influence, for engagement, prescriptive power and long-term presence.
• Opt for several micro-influencers or nano-influencers to reach different niches while reaching a large number of people.
• Turn content creators into brand ambassadors to ensure long-term visibility.
• Organize contests to boost your visibility, make your products known in no time at all and inspire a positive feeling among your users.
• Combine a short post, designed to hook users, with a more narrative publication (IGTV, YouTube video), designed to give more details about the brand or product.
• Prioritize the formats most promoted by Instagram, such as Stories and Reels whose virality is no longer to be proven.
• Sponsor influencers’ publications and reuse user-generated content (UGC) in ads to quickly gain visibility without losing authenticity.
• Co-create a product or campaign with an influencer or a brand to reach a new audience and benefit from a halo effect.
  

The example to follow? T.LeClerc, an iconic French beauty brand which managed to improve its brand awareness in just 6 months. With Hivency by its side, the cosmetics brand directed 13 micro-influencer campaigns, including a co-branding operation with the french jeweler Atelier de Famille. This co-branding resulted in a significant increase in traffic to the brand’s website and over 2 million consumers reached. Amazing!

Boosting your reputation thanks to YouTube

YouTube is the second favorite social network for 50% of marketers (source : Hivency). This appeal for this social video streaming network is easily explained by the fact that :

• YouTube provides access to many consumers and it is the second most used social media in the world, after Facebook. The platform has no less than 2.2 billion monthly users (source: Statista and BDM).
• Long videos shared on YouTube allow for an in-depth discourse, while giving a view of the products and their use. The content shared on the platform is therefore the perfect complement to the shorter and catchier publications shared on other social networks such as Instagram and TikTok…
• Internet users particularly trust YouTubers. People are 7 times more attached to influencers on YouTube than to those on other platforms (Source: HubSpot). Brands that rely on these content creators benefit from a real proximity with consumers.
• YouTube allows brands to be referenced more quickly on Google (SEO). As everyone knows, appearing in the first results on the number 1 search engine is essential to consolidate the reputation of a company.
• YouTube could soon become an essential social commerce platform. Since summer 2021, the Google subsidiary has been testing social shopping features (Source: Siècle Digital). The live streaming-shopping trend, already observed in China, could soon spread to the whole world.
• YouTube is no stranger to the success of T. LeClerc’s success mentioned above. In addition to Instagram and the blog channel, the brand called on several YouTubers recruited via Hivency. The result: optimized Google referencing and a 450% increase in traffic to its website via YouTube.

The trendy platform TikTok to improve your brand awareness 

The outsider TikTok is of interest to a growing number of marketers. In 2021, 68% of American marketers say they will deploy an influencer marketing strategy on this social network. A figure that is rising sharply, since in 2019 only 16% of respondents were interested in the Chinese platform (Source: Emarketer).

All this enthusiasm echoes the phenomenal success met by TikTok with the public. Initially the preserve of teenagers, the short video sharing platform has conquered a large audience. TikTok has become the most downloaded application in the world in 2020 and now has more than 3 billion subscribers, including 732 million active monthly users (Source: France Inter). TikTok represents a real opportunity for brands that want to build or reinforce their notoriety at high speed:

• The platform records unprecedented engagement rates compared to other social networks. In 2020, the posts of TikTokers generated an average engagement rate of 15.86%, while those of Instagram influencers enjoyed a respectable 2.2% (Source: Statista).
• Moreover, the application is designed to promote the virality of the contents which are diffused there. On TikTok, you don’t need to have a bunch of subscribers to reach thousands (or even millions) of users.
• Finally, TikTok allows advertisers to launch viral challenges. The objective: to imagine a choreography or a video concept and propose to the TikTok community, trained by influencers, to reproduce it. For brands, Hashtags Challenges are an opportunity to create a real connection with consumers, to generate a positive feeling and to receive maximum visibility. According to TikTok, Hashtags Challenges are 4.5 times more effective than traditional mobile ads when it comes to boosting brand awareness (source: TikTok).

The example to follow? The luxury ready-to-wear brand Moncler, whose Hashtag Challenge, powered by a handful of influencers, has generated more than 2.6 million videos and obtained 7.4 billion views. (Source: TikTok).

TikTok and Instagram are therefore the social networks that allow companies to improve their reputation the fastest. Nevertheless, to establish your reputation, consider investing in the different social media on which your target is located.

Want to boost your brand’s reputation? Join the Hivency micro-influencer platform and launch your next campaigns on Instagram and TikTok, but also on YouTube, Pinterest and the blog channel.

Photo credits: Jiroe via Unsplash